I’m sorry – you could probably shuffle the titles and the text in this series and they’d match up just as well, and every chapter looks the same to me too. The part six heading is starting to look like the overall one, the series title as well. Same stuff, I’m afraid. I’ll try to come at it from a new angle.

I’ve been trying to learn biology and evolution, brain science, as well as continuing to learn about psychology and philosophy. Blindly, at home alone, reading, I almost walked straight into the library at the University of the bloody Alt-Right (via a nasty little site dedicated to alt-Right “science” called Quillette). I read a bunch of Steven Pinker’s books, Judith Rich Harris, and although Rich Harris didn’t seem political, I’ve since come to understand that the Alt-right likes her and Pinker, and maybe a little bit of why. I know I differ with them both where they touch upon parenting, but I do with everyone. I’m afraid I may never get to Dawkins, I’m not happy with him politically either, but Pinker summarized him, laid out the Selfish Gene idea. It all seemed like good info, biology seemed to line up with reality a lot better than the ideas I had about popular psychology and such, and my thinking changed.

Unfortunately, it seems that biology in these contexts, behaviour, psychology – has become the territory of racists and Nazis. My thinking hasn’t changed that much!

I am not one of those, I swear to God, but all one need do today is mention some biological concept and it seems that one is choosing sides. No SJW, no good person wants to hear about why the world that we hate the way it is would be that way, it seems to be doctrinal that there mustn’t be any real reasons, or at least not biological reasons.

“Societal” reasons, culture-down explanations seem to be the answers that aren’t proscribed, what I see, every hundred tweets, is some version of “. . . because we live in a society which . . .” which is the formula for a tautology and it really doesn’t matter what words precede and follow it. We define a society is a bunch of organisms in a group and it’s rather circular to only define the organisms that way, as members of the society.

You don’t have to be on the alt-Right – and I’m not – to think this: the society thinks what its members think. Yes, there is plenty of meme flow in the other direction, and I know, some lines of thought are simply not made available in certain societies, but none of this communication or philosophy changes biology. If these cultural memes do not serve our biology, they do not last. Natural selection suggests that our eternal problems, the human condition, has at its roots some cause underwritten by our basic biological necessities. The memes we see and hear to support our never-ending struggles like racism and inequality, to support our sense of group identity and conflict, these, even when expressed by the society, I think we can assume find fertile soil in the individual, in our biological selves. Not the tree, not racism, that is not an evolved trait, which again, might have been the Nazi conclusion – but the fighting and the violence that underlies it.

Racism isn’t why there is violence; racism is one of a number of vectors by which to rationalize the hatred of, and the killing, discounting, dehumanization, degradation, exploitation, etc., etc., of human beings and if you think that would end if we were identical clones, then you’ve been listening to the bad guys. Our long aboriginal existence and the long developmental period our species has undergone did not have us eternally battling, pale Swedes against Nigerians. That scenario is rather new. In the normal human situation, our neighbors are our cousins and we have to create ways to differentiate, for security. Any fighting we’ve done for millions of years has been like that, with those guys next door. So, there you go.

I’m not the Nazi here; I’m not the one who blames humanity’s violence on the fact that people come in different colours. Were you? I mean until now?

So, the Deep Roots of War idea doesn’t support racism, I mean unless you want it to. I mean, it does support war. And if you like war, then I guess you don’t probably mind race war, so the connection is there, if not directly, and the Deep Roots of War is still responsible for all of our ills in the end, it’s still depressing as Hell. Because we’re calling it “biological,” some folks will tell you it’s written in stone, and that’s what we liberals hear when we hear it, some version of “that’s just the way it is” – and Nazism. Remember, for certain mindsets, the “Deep” part might mean something less than six thousand years, which sounds short to a scientist, but that mindset thinks it’s eternity. That framing makes if forever, since the beginning, and literally written in stone. Anyone who has read me before, anyone following this train of thought, knows that I think the Deep Roots of War are behavioural, a choice, and that I’m trying to lay it out for us, bring it into the spotlight.

Again, to say that our troubles are based in our biology, a Nazi could say that, but to say “based in our biology” is not the same as saying I like it, I agree with it, and we should just go with it. That would be the Nazi stand (based in a badly biased “reading” of the science), I think; it is not mine. I am an SJW, I want to change these things. Fortunately, or unfortunately, I am also a truth seeker primarily, and to change these things we need to understand them, and if that goes to some aspect of us being animals, then we need to understand that. Not to “excuse it” as some SJW on Twitter assumed just the other day, which I never said and never do, but I understood their assumption. At least online, again, biology seems to be the province of Nazis and racists. Well behavioural biology and evolutionary psychology, to be more accurate. The SJW person online heard “evo-psych” and was done with the conversation.

That can’t go on, that’s for sure. The good folks of the world need to own that science, those people can’t be trusted with it! (It occurs to one that if the Nazis and racists had any explanation, any science or even theory, that they wouldn’t always be trying to co-opt every new gene, every new insight from science. They’re still searching for their first bit of scientific support. We can’t trust their motivations, and we sure can’t trust their talents.)

A Jehovah’s Witness spoke to me a few days ago, gave me a brochure, and the point of his talk and the brochure was, what would you rather believe, these other theories, or a full-blown resurrection with all your friends and family? Put that way, who could argue? But I fear SJWs are choosing their culture-down explanations with the same criteria as the JWs, going with I’m sorry, blank slate social science, the same sort of thing as the ladies going into psychology and leaving firmer sciences to the men, the ladies and the good men choosing psychology and leaving behavioural biology to the KKK. It’s a sad result, but I get it.

In the most basic terms, we often think of two worlds, the nasty old one we have and the shiny new one we want, and it appears that the humanities and the social sciences reach for the new one while many biology projects seem to drag us back and down into the old one. I’m sorry. The old one is where the troubles are, and we carry it with us. The only real solutions are going to be in there, we have to work through it if we ever want that pretty new one, and I do, I really do. I’ve found something too! The answers really are in there, for those who seek with a pure – non-Nazi – heart. I say again, do not fear the Deep Roots of War ape, that’s what the bad guys want. They’re keeping him in a cage and torturing him, only letting us see him when he’s in a rage. They have gentle secrets to hide, truths that don’t fit their agenda and things that work better when we’re not conscious of them.

We need to advocate for the Deep Roots of War ape. We need to look at him with love, understand his fears and address those. The answer, dear liberals, SJWs, is not to hate that part of ourselves and deny it, and it certainly isn’t to let the bloody Nazis of the world have him to do with whatever they want.

In academic terms, the schism between social science and firmer sciences must end, the good people can’t be ignoring science if they have real world goals and the bad people can’t be the only ones with access to the CRISPR machine.

The way we don’t trust prisoners with writing implements, belts, or shoelaces, you can’t trust people with certain technologies. Case in point, how’d you find me? Social mass media must be one of our greatest mistakes, considering that social stress is the bane of all primates, shortens all our lives as it is. Also, guns, I guess.

I wanted to help the world, I saw something that seemed hurtful and harmful and I figured it out, what was going on, but I’m worried that these things are not meant to be seen and should I affect the world at all, I fear that when the movie gets made they’ll be casting Jesse Eisenberg for my role. Who else but the guy who did such a good job with Lex Luthor and Mark Zuckerberg? Yes, I was the one who saw the emasculation of modern urban men and took it viral, gave it an anti-steroid boost. I was the one who decided that in order to be good, humanity needed to be weak, I am the man who castrated the world. I want to say something about how easy it is for us to slide that intense looking actor with a Jewish name into that cast type, and I want to co-opt the image for myself with a joke, ‘I am Solomon Grundy’ or some crap, so . . . so it all fits, I guess.

I don’t believe any stuff about evil Jews taking over the world, no more than evil Bible people of all sorts, and if Jesse’s somehow perfect in my mind for evil genius roles and it sells movies in the culture generally, then I am a racist, anti-Semitic member of a racist and anti-Semitic society, and I’m sorry, I’m working on it. I wasn’t after any divisive ‘ism’ there at all, the point is, I identify with the evil villain – and so too I identify with Jewish folks, as a not quite white guy, someone who at first glance should be enjoying his membership among the dominant social group but perhaps isn’t. Someone with a grudge forced upon him, someone who deserves some sort of comeuppance and so must never get the upper hand, or even justice, which would be a chance at it.

I mean, I got some bitterness. No more than the average super-villain, but yeah, enough that I might just be trying to destroy the world and someone probably should keep an eye on me. I’ve got a lot of stuff going on here, saving the world and/or destroying it, I don’t think I can do this renovation while worrying about the damage I’m causing, you better protect yourself, keep your gloves up. I can’t do that for you too, I can’t do everything – this is your heads-up here. Honestly, the deep roots of war ape doesn’t need to be told to protect itself, far from it, but I just want it on record that I gave you every chance, publicly, consciously, and out loud. Every chance to put the gun down, put your dick away and talk to me. It isn’t going to be easy, when I spell it out, what I think of you. So far, it’s been innuendo and sound bites in the press, I’ve been meting it out, drip by drip, you might have to have read everything by me to know the true extent of my misanthropy, but here is my indictment. Everybody chill?

We’re a species of child abusers, and it’s what makes us different, the core, not of what we are, we are animals with a large non-human biology, but absolutely the core of what makes us different, the core of our “humanity.” It’s no accident, no new development, and it’s not rare. The fact that we think it’s rare means we spend all day long creating it, we think it’s lacking in the world, so it’s basically all we do.

It’s not for nothing, though.

As in all matters biological, it’s a survival thing. I do not have or represent a high opinion of humanity at the moment, but even from this hole I’ve dug myself, so deep I can see the stars at noon, even now, on the precipice of the Trump administration ‘finding its stride,’ I don’t imagine we would do that for nothing. It’s about security. It’s not complex, and I don’t know if it gets addressed by game theory, but abuse makes you many sorts of tough, because it motivates, one wants to be tough – oops, already writing and still undergoing revelation again! That is punishment, I think I have finally just answered my lifelong question, ‘what is punishment?’

It doesn’t make you self-motivated to obey the rule in question; we still want what we want, it only overpowers our self-interest, you may want that, but do you want this? sort of thing, as we all know, it’s meant to force a cost/benefit analysis. But it gives us self-motivation on the other vector, on the most mission critical thing in life: violence. We will strive to be tough, and the tribe will be tough, because we all feel that if we are tough enough, we are safe, both on the personal level and at the group level. Abuse makes us strong, so, again, we don’t abuse our kids for nothing, it’s to make sure we all grow up “strong,” it’s our security from the other groups. I’m spending time on philosophy podcasts these days, I know it shows, so here’s a thought experiment.

Mom may punish a boy for taking an extra piece of toast off of his brother’s breakfast plate, then take him to hockey practice where the coach may punish the boy for not taking the puck or some real estate on the ice from another boy. Now, how is the boy to learn the first lesson in the face of the second? How to learn the second while retaining the first? Of course, we learn our different contexts, we may solve the apparent conundrum – or we may not, but on a more visceral level, both scenes are the same: boy gets punished, and his solution for the common aspects will be the same: some aspect of toughening him up, from the simple learned experience of surviving pain, desensitization or a dampening of the initial fears to an “aggressive” unloading of it onto someone else. We like to say it’s supposed to be that other boy with the puck, but again, pain, abuse, these are not teaching tools, they change you, is the point.

The prosecution has just completed its opening statement, and this is the charge: we, as a species, abuse our children, to incite violence in them. This is “our group’s” strategy to protect the replication of our genes against those of competing human groups.

If we couldn’t speak to those other human groups at all, then this is the situation one would expect, but we can and we do, and so it’s heartbreaking and endlessly frustrating. If I could just agree, and go along, I surely would, and honestly, if I could go back and avoid the entire train of thought, I think I would do that too. The fate of humanity is way above my pay grade, and I’m stuck now, but if I could have seen the size of the problem going in, I surely would have balked. I may have attempted to say this before – I went from wondering if anything could be done or not, an apparent fifty-fifty proposition, to what I think is an understanding, and my estimation of our odds became sort of astronomical. Like the grass, like the leaves on the trees, one in that number.

We basically have no language that isn’t an expression of inherent group conflict and we don’t know what to say or how to speak without an enemy or a war; I tend to globalize, but if I didn’t, all signs still point in one direction, that every verb is based in a fight and every noun is an adapted version of some opponent. Security demands that we approach all problems at this level and nearly all of our strategies are internal group strategies, with the other groups’ sentience unconsidered, because our strategies must “work” even if the other groups are bears, if you cannot talk to them at all. We have a lot of hopes for our communication, but talking isn’t a strategy in itself, it’s just not dependable enough to be an evolved answer to conflict and violence. At least, other things have not yet aligned in such a way at this point in our history. To date, those two things, conflict and violence have been both our questions but also our answer, our violence as a credible response to someone else’s.

It’s practical, no argument there. Also, the war never ends, active battle or détente, so there never is a safe time, but let me just raise my head above the melee for a second here and try to think in the longer term, as soldiers often try to do at my age, is there a way to not have to do this?

It is not the end of any philosophical roads to see that violence, whether an organism lives or dies, is foundational, our first concern. Even the replication of our genes is a happy, recreational thought when the bear is chasing us, or when the humans next door are feeling uh, expansive, so all biologists, talk a little quieter, go talk to Freud, there’s more to life than sex. I understand that Dawkins made the point that it is our genes’ struggle to carry on that drives everything and not some social animal’s “group harmony,” which, OK, I don’t really see harmony as a powerful force in the universe either – shades of Plato – but group conflict has the power to seriously disrupt the well laid plans of the genes of men and mice, doesn’t it? Surely, some would-be immortal genes go down when species go down, when animals get selected out.

It’s interesting, how we can know it and not know it at the same time, but this is our fear, this is our reaction to any un-punished transgression that we see, it’s a missed opportunity to toughen someone up, and we all somehow intuit that it means we’re in trouble the next time the Hun is on the move. The nurture assumption – the idea that we mold our children – is inexplicable in the conversation about socialization that has tried to account for it, but completely covered by antisocialization theory. It is the dark side of what we have known it to be, and it is unacknowledged, unconscious, but the connection has no extra steps, it is rather direct: discipline is security. Tell someone they shouldn’t beat their children and watch the reaction: it’s a survival issue, and not just their kids’ survival. There’s personal fear behind that too.

So, this is me, the fatal mutation, saying, what about crime, what about rape? What about all the people in the millions and more that would like to see a solution to our solution, to violence and hate? It’s all one thing, violence as a strategy, and violent crimes at home are the evil “side effect” of our strength, so we have a problem. Do we carry on, trying to separate the wheat from the chaff, our “good,” defensive violence strategy from our wish to live peacefully among our own people, which, at least beginning now is no strategy at all, because abuse changes people, at home and on the battlefield? Or do we simply ignore the downside of our methods, after all we’re still here, aren’t we? The last method has always been our way.

Proud, fierce, and brave, this is our model of a warrior, and pride is privilege, fierceness is violence, and bravery is a prioritization of offense over defense. This is the survival instinct stripped bare, and every rat must feel that way to live as well, it’s a good life if you don’t weaken, so my challenge to us is this: find a better model. Your “hero” is an entitled, murderous narcissist. And we wonder, why all this trouble?

I’ve wondered it anyways, and as near as I can see, this is the conflict. If we stay strong, in this way, our life is abuse in a deal that keeps us alive, or so we think, and we think that if we stop abusing our own, that the competition will abuse us in a more permanent way. Perhaps truly, as long as we cannot talk to the other groups, this is the best we can do, folks who live away from the borders can live in some semblance of peace, most of the violence being non-lethal – but again, we can talk, or almost, so we may have options in this modern world that we didn’t before. I would have said ‘any minute now,’ a few years ago, but it seems the world is going in the other direction at the moment. Sometime, maybe. Here I am, worrying that I may destroy the world in my particular way, but as always, world without end, the good ones worry and the bad ones just get on with it.

The real world, as it is – yes, assuming there is one. Now, what is the sense in not assuming that? We’d have to just stop talking and don’t be ridiculous, that’s not happening. I spew therefore I am! – and Maya, the world of illusion, appearances: these are your options. Maya is the world where there can be things like “sport chocolate,” where the policeman is your friend, and where our leaders are our betters.

Of course, debate rages on about the nature of the real world and whether we even have a chance to discern it. Many a theory suggests that reality isn’t as nice as this other world, though, and it’s something like consensus that we should strive to bring the two together, either by guessing the nature of the real world and adapting ourselves to it, or by making our world of human constructs and wishes real, by imposing ourselves upon the world in such a way as to make it adapt to us. Again, that we can discern reality is still a question, so it’s mostly the other thing, isn’t it? Honestly, though? It’s what I want. I think our best bet, or the only play for us, is to find out what’s stopping that Norman Rockwell world from being the real one and fixing it. We don’t have that benevolent, understandable reality that we see on TV, but we sort of have the image, and that can serve as a goal for us, at least a first goal, and that’s half the battle.

You give humans a goal, a project, some fractal version of a battle, and they will go to work. It’s just that other things make it possible for us to think we’re there already, that that goal is behind us somehow. So far, when we have seen through the curtain, we’ve mostly seen a little bit of why things aren’t as nice as they seem and named the causes – Freud’s primal drives, Christian original sin, biology and the deep roots of war, culture-down explanations – and we are left to understand that there is basically nothing to be done. First, the world is this way, Son, and then, no, it is not, and here’s why it can never be.

We need to make some room for no, it’s not, but it can be, let’s make it that way. First, we need to stop pretending we’re there already, that the arc of the universe bends towards justice all by itself, then maybe we see a need, a project, a battle, and we try to create a world where things do have a chance to lean in that direction.

I want to run with the TV allegory. What didn’t we see in the idyllic TV world of “My Three Sons?” Fred MacMurray beating the crap out of those boys. We sort of know that’s one of the differences between the world we like to display and the one we create, right? The messaging is there on the TV, we learn to do it, but the reality of it, the before picture is not part of the display. Of course, our view of the after picture is also not exactly complete and holistic.

It was heartbreaking for me when my kids were in grade school and learning about our democracy, how the Canadian government works. The people vote for the rep that best represents them, and their rep goes to Ottawa to do it, and this House and that Senate . . . to hear it taught like that, surely this is the utopia! A better, more egalitarian system has surely never been conceived and democracies must be as close to heaven as humanity can get.

Another difference appears when our kids play sports. When they’re young, they’re “learning teamwork,” how to work together as a group, cooperation, and that’s true, but you don’t hear about, we don’t talk about the other side of the coin, that they are learning how to work together against the other team. Speeches all day long about cooperation, none about conflict despite conflict being the larger goal that teamwork serves, until the gloves come off, mostly just for the boys, in high school – Maya. We are teaching cooperation, that’s what they’re learning, like it’s up to us, what kids learn from our interactions with them. But it’s up to us what we acknowledge.

It’s something like faith, that I think we could make something like that that is real, and better, that it doesn’t have to be a story for children that we all grow out of along with our happiness. We may or may not have the tools to see reality in all its aspects, but the opposite is not impossible. Some of these differences can be understood, even in this relativism; many truths are inherently relativistic anyhow and postulating absolutes, floors and ceilings, would bring us no nearer to them if we had eternity to try. This is one of the lessons of the world of illusions, Maya is flamboyant, it will offer you sweeter and more palatable visions until finally even the dullest of us get suspicious. We may not be able to prove truth and reality, but we have evolved a bullshit detector, when the stuff gets deep enough.

I hope my examples above serve to make the point – even the dullest of us, all the way down to me. Just because ultimate reality may not be visible doesn’t mean we can’t see lies and falsehoods, and if we move away from those, we should be moving closer to the truth, right? Relativism notwithstanding, too.

Biology, though, is there something there?

(I am certainly a poor example, but what little insight I’ve had suggests that if philosophers learn biology, evolutionary theory, truth will flow like water. Don’t wait for the geeks to learn philosophy, navel-gazers, learn evolution and watch your philosophy be transformed. Making sense of the world is a philosopher’s job, let’s not farm that out to lesser disciplines.)

For what, though? For other important biological functions, that is to say, adaptively, as ways of dealing with our environment, again to say – for the status quo. If we stop our evolved deceptions, the biologicals that have evolved to detect them have an easy job and we have a bad day, is the theory. So what sort of trouble will we find if we lose these ones, my examples, if we stop pretending we have happy, talking oriented families like the ones on TV, or that our kids aren’t silently learning ritualized war with their sports, or that the one person one vote thing isn’t really working out?

I need to start putting advisory alerts on these things, don’t I?

I know I’m an ass for always leaving it with a rhetorical question, so let’s see if I can jump my own tracks, I don’t have to keep the changes, do I?

The answers of course, are that we may have to include our discipline in our calculations of who and what we are and be challenged to explain it, that if our childhood battle training is seen for what it is, that we either continue it consciously or stop and fear losing the next war, and that if we lose belief in elections that we revert to some form of authoritarianism instead. That’s a pretty terrible bunch of consequences if we simply stop our individual deceptive defenses and nothing else changes, but that is only a survival deal breaker when viewed from within our social group. If we can consider that all groups have these issues, then we can address the problem from both sides at once. These things are strategies for group problems, and larger strategies can be found.

Life, in a certain sense is a falsehood, having somehow sprung from its opposite and being forever in opposition to the reality that spawned it, and as we know, the immortal falsehoods are layered ones, enigmas wrapped up in other obfuscations that leave us in a relativistic purgatory when we try to penetrate them – wait! This is the hopey-changey part!

That relativism is good, because when we see past our human world of civilized constructions, when that masquerade fails and we see through to a darker layer, I want us to remember that that is only another layer, not some absolute limit, not some floor, ceiling, or wall. The next layer may look dark and nasty, but don’t believe it when it whispers to you that it is the end, the “truth.” It never is. When we look past our veneer, that may indeed be something biological we’re seeing, even the deep roots of war ape that we fear, but we shouldn’t fear him. That’s just his defensive posturing.

He’s tough, but he’s not so smart. We’ll get past him. To the next layer.

Hey, the oracle says I have a few followers, which I assume translates to some few readers.

Can I ask for something?

Will someone tell me – is this train of thought hurting anyone? I mean, besides me?

I’m starting to believe my own prose, that I and this exploration are a lethal mutation and that I had best just shut the fuck up. Can anyone imagine any sort of light at the end of this tunnel? I am starting to think that truth at all costs is maybe too absolute, that nothing is worth all costs.

I’m going to give you a bunch of theory – OK, that seems a stretch, a bunch of my theorizing, how’s that – but this is really from the gut, from personal experience. It’s not going to work out, because it sure as fuck hasn’t worked out for me. I know, I’m a dude, it wasn’t supposed to work out for me, I mean it hasn’t worked out for me or for the women in my life either.

They apparently hate a feminist man more than the chauvinists they so properly hate, we only confuse them or something. Plus, it’s safer to hate on a guy whose strategy is not to use violence, isn’t it?

A violent, misogynist man, a guy who fights and wins and so dominates his household is a clear problem, and his victims are clearly wronged, but the opposite strategy – letting the ladies win the fights – is even less popular. Now I’ve made my wives and daughters the dominants, the winners, the responsible and the guilty ones. I’m back to warrior society: the women hate a man who abuses his physical superiority, but no society has any use for a man who won’t fight.

I literally complained to a gay woman about a misogynist acquaintance of mine, a Trump fan, a Hillary hater, and a fellow who believes himself to be an alpha male, and watched this woman choose this fellow over me. I was the whiner or something, she knew I’d lost the battle with my girls, she knew I considered myself feminist, but her empathy was with the traditional male, his role was normal, at least. It’s the old Hulk problem, of course, we all want a big strong murderous friend, but can’t he leave me alone? Whereas this little guy leaves you alone, but he hasn’t killed anything the whole time you’ve known him.

I chose not to win at all emotional costs, I didn’t want to live with that steady hum of hate from the women, the would-be feminists, so I didn’t. I feel I’ve been sold a bill of goods, however; I did what the ladies in my life seemed to be asking for, and at this point in my life, I will say, the hate does not seem to have been lessened, that the evolved emotions and behaviours around gender conflict are perhaps not so easily talked away. This is decades away and an entirely different conversation, but like a lot of less articulate men, I’m having trouble forgetting being forever passed over as a young suitor for exactly the rough and tough types that are the bad guys in today’s conversation. I told myself then that all those girls who ignored me would learn it the hard way eventually, but here I am decades later, and they still seem to like me less than the proud and the brave.

The tough guys will slap you around, but if pussies like me take over, it’s some other social group’s bad guys you’ll have to deal with, and better the devil you know than the one you don’t, right? To bring that back down to Earth, I think that’s a fair description of the mindset of the wives of the alt-Right, the wives of the KKK and the Nazis. No? Of course, those are extreme, highly visible examples, but this sort of basic conflict underlies far less obviously sinister situations as well – yours, mine, etc.

That’s the situation, if we want to deal up gender roles, we had better learn to understand our roles, we had better learn to see the warrior society and take a more comprehensive approach. As for me, I’m doomed. I won’t have the traditional role, and the feminist dream is over, there’s no place for me anymore. Reporting from just outside humanity, I’m

Oh yes, I hate everything, I trust nothing and no-one, no doubt due to some seriously hard feelings – but I guess I must have opted to keep the hard feelings and jettison everything I had learned for the crucial first many years of my life instead. Probably the wrong way around in hindsight, but I was pretty young. Am I going to have to take responsibility for that decision, if that’s what it was? Before we’re done I think science may give me an excuse – but it’s certainly not appropriate to describe these sorts of internal events by way of Murphy’s Law, is it? I mean besides the fact that it’s borderline racist. Of course, that’s the nature of the beast, not just for me, hard feelings and little or no hard data. That’s all of us, and almost completely. I am either a fool or wise one, because it’s just that much more complete with me.

My point, the real point of this fantasy is this, though: everyone who remembers their childhoods, everyone with a “normal” pattern of life and learning “just knows” how to raise their children, and few question the system they were brought up in, other than in terms of degree of ‘strictness.’

I think I forgot my indoctrination, somehow brainwashed myself. I forgot how to raise kids, something we’ve all seen our entire lives, all day long.

My super power is that my mutation makes me something other than human, so that I can study humans. It’s hard to get a clear view of yourself, so the universe has created me, your dark, magic mirror, with a simple tweak of the ol’ DNA along with the abusively engineered life to epigenetically activate it, starting with my drop-date – double Scorpio. Ha.

The DNA tweak is part of the metaphor, of course – but not perhaps all a joke, either. Mom was on some morning sickness drug or something I need to get the name of for you, it’s not Thalidomide, which I would remember. I can’t recall if it’s the same drug that was associated with my sisters’ adult cervical cysts and possible cancers. I wasn’t a flipper baby, but really, there was some deformity. My umbilical wouldn’t die and stop bleeding, so a surgery found it still completely hooked up to the bowel with some bit of intestine that is not supposed to be there. “Umbilical hernia” was the term, but I’m having trouble relating that to the longer description they gave us and I just gave you, so it’s not clear to me, like everything else about my past because I either flushed it or I never wanted to know. So, I’ve got that part of the science fiction/super hero back story going for me too.

“Affliction,” in the classical sense, I think. In Dr. Jekyll and Mister Hyde, Stevenson invoked a ‘sense of deformity’ to repel and horrify us about his monster, and I remember that stung a bit, I took that sort of personally.

I don’t mean to raise the issue of deformity in order to return to it later, I really am not planning a sci-fi or fantasy ending to this project! I offer it only in full disclosure, because to leave such a physical humiliation – I have never had a belly button, my scar was always a ‘zipper’ – out of the ‘outsider’ narrative I’m using as my biography would be to destroy the point. I’m simply leaving no embarrassment out, or I hope so anyway. It’s also bloody mythical, isn’t it? Having no navel makes you non-human, maybe not even mammalian. The symbolism of the lost connection is powerful. No?

The deformity thing is true. It’s the ‘visitor’ narrative that is the fantasy. Readers, you’re my double check for that. Someone let me know when I’ve let slip that I can no longer tell the difference, OK? That last story has me wondering a little. Wow. I need to let that sort of dissipate, catch my breath. That is fucking weird. Back in five.

Yup, still the zipper. I should be relieved, right? Relax Jeff, you’re not completely delusional – just not apparently placental. Well, you can’t have everything, can you?

Further to the weirdness of my deformity, father in law had it too! Umbilical hernia they said, and he too, the zipper, the erasure of his placental origin, the sign! I see my future in this situation, my marriage in his, that in my wife’s family, the breeding males must have their primal connection wiped from history, the bridge between mother and child, between man and woman must be destroyed. I fear I have inadvertently let myself glimpse the impossibility that my own demise could ever be a trauma to the women I’ve betrayed all my brothers for.

Where was I?

Continuing with the conscious part of the fantasy, I’m on the outside looking in at our species, at least as far as breeding goes. That is what will have to pass for my super power in this fantasy: I don’t “just know” a lot of regular stuff about “discipline” and I don’t trust another human to figure it out, so I have to do it from scratch. I know, not much of a super power at first glance, but it depends, doesn’t it? Mostly it depends on whether what everybody else knows is true or not. Short answer, yes . . .

Long answer?

No.

The long answer is this here blog.

Where everyone else saw some normal and proper version of childrearing in use, at least among the majority of their own peers, I saw chaos and a system designed not to help children develop normally through their growing years but to bend and break us all into the shape required for us to match the bent and broken shaped container our society and our families have made for us (Shout out to Takingthemaskoff, a powerful voice everyone needs to read). I saw madness calling itself reason and I saw a need for a new approach, because I either missed the lesson, never believed it enough to memorize it, or managed to un-learn it somehow, but where others saw parenting as a known and understood thing, I didn’t trust them and their system, I rejected authoritative parenting carte blanche. If what they said matched anything that the grownups in my life even might have said, then no, no, no!

No-one is lazy, nothing is lazy. It’s always slander, and almost always baseless.

“Lazy” is what a writer or a thinker says when his argument has run out of steam, and it’s always some sort of bigoted “reason” applied to some group of people that we will allow it for. Voters are too “lazy” to research the issues and the candidates, most people are “lazy” and don’t plan for the future – it’s not that other people are slaving away upwards from forty hours a week to muddy the issues and manage what we get to know about candidates, it’s not that “less lazy” people take every penny poor people have before they can even afford to go to the doctor, again, as their paid job, all day long.

I’ve been learning philosophy in a podcast, and that’s every damn philosopher’s answer about regular people too, why we don’t think more. They’re living lives of contemplation, but regular folks are – OK, intellectually – “lazy.”

Of course, it’s understood, at least since the industrial revolution, right? “Lazy” is bad, sloth is one of the seven deadly sins. This when all these lazy plebes’ constant labour before and after that amplification of it has all but destroyed the world. It’s amazing that it could need to be said, but it wasn’t those lazy gorillas did all that. “Work” isn’t all good, not by a long shot. We didn’t wipe this environment out on our vacations. We do that at work.

That podcast, Philosophize This, by one Stephen West, is a good overview/history of philosophy, but I swear, if we run all things philosophical and/or psychological through a filter of biology and evolutionary thinking, then we can really start to learn something. Case in point, Stephen describes a version of human nature, a story to explain human laziness, that if we live beside a stream, we tend not to use a distant stream for our water, that of course, we go to the handy one. In this blank slate, philosophical conversation, this shows laziness to be our default condition – but biology has a different take.

That is not laziness, that is evolution, survival. We need water, but to walk for miles spending calories for calorie free water makes no sense. This sort of “laziness” is demonstrably selected for and survival critical. Clearly, the person whose take on human nature is alluded to above, has a stake in someone else’s output. Perhaps he has a food stand between the streams.

Beware of the “lazy” label, it’s always a dodge, a slander thrown out in lieu of an actual argument. Lazy is good, the world needs more lazy. It’s the Hippocratic oath, a huge part of first doing no harm.

Oh my God, how many times have I written that? This must be the third identical dry heave on the subject, I saw one from half a year ago and it brought half a memory of an earlier one . . . I am just not getting there, not dredging up the last toxic bit of bile. I’m fucking looping, is that a verb now? I spend half my year getting ready, working up the courage to face this task, work through this, figure it out and when I finally decide I’m feeling strong enough, I go back to the toilet to try again. Then I document my spasms and my view of the world from there.

I think I’m planning a Part #2 every time, but I never do, because it’s going to be toxic. That was my life plan, that’s what good Christians do, we absorb pain and nastiness, take it into ourselves and out of circulation in the world; the idea isn’t to groom it, grow it and unleash it. The idea is to grow a cyst or a pearl around it, quarantine it, and take it out of the world permanently when we die. It’s supposed to be strength and will doing what it can to alleviate evil and suffering in the world, it’s not supposed to be Frankenstein and his monster or Teller and his bomb. Now, I don’t recall Victor saying that he must create it or die himself, or Teller either, and I am a very patient sort of a person, but I’m afraid I don’t see a future for myself, I don’t see more than one solution for my pain and angst at this point and my life all day long consists of the awareness that I’m just delaying, holding out for as long as I can.

That, and the moral consideration that so long as the lights are on and I’m consuming resources, my ungrateful life is raising the sea levels and killing poor people the world over.

Hmmm. Does it bother anyone that in this metaphor, my personal sadness and my worldview/philosophy are interchangeable? This must be my major malfunction here, right? To me, it’s all one, but there can’t be another human being out there that isn’t saying, ““warrior society” and divorce? Really?”

I can make the case with “rational” babble, it’s what I do all day, “yes, the state of the world hurts, the human condition hurts,” but the world wants details, right? Make it personal, or no-one else will feel it, I know. It is going to be my life’s crusade if I make one, to merge the two, because public is personal, and our personal problems are too common not to be public ones, but not today.

Part #1 was January 10th., what seemed like a productive day, I was exhausted after writing it in the morning, which made me falsely imagine I was getting somewhere with it, and despite a bone weariness, I got a few errands done in the afternoon and even took a walk, although I gassed out and cut it short. I hadn’t realized the repetition of that blog yet, and I was telling myself that I needed to push forward, and that probably I needed to go to a dark place, let out some of the nasty stuff I wasn’t admitting I was thinking. It’s always something you’re afraid to say, to yourself or whomever, that is the problem, right? So, I was brooding on that overnight, hoping I’d be able to write my way through something in the morning.

I write in the morning, before the pain killing effect of marijuana accumulates and stiffens me up, body, heart, and mind, and I don’t know why everybody else writes, but one big reason for me is, that’s the way I can see my own thoughts. Promises made to ourselves in silence, no-one can hold us to. It’s a dangerous way to learn about race and such on Twitter, writing to see your thoughts and finding out they’re shit sometimes, but Twitter is sort of amazing. There’s a lot of bile, but if you’re really trying, someone will appreciate it. Total honesty almost works as a life strategy in that place. Anyhow, I was trying to get to a dark place, planning to write this part yesterday morning when I got a phone call, a crisis call, very possibly a suicide call from a good old friend who was absolutely on the edge – and guess what sort of a speech I had loaded up. Not only did I paint a horrible picture for the guy, who responded that he’s driving around with a rope in the trunk, but I said it, spent any righteousness I may have had about it by basically trying to murder a friend with it – and lost it.

Toxic AF, that’s me. I wanted to purge some negativity, truth above all, no fear, push through, and before I put my two fingers to the keyboard, I’ve already killed someone. I spent the whole day knowing this would be the end, that I would never be able to say anything to anyone ever again, before he answered his phone just before dinner, and it’s not over yet. He’s a lot closer to the edge than I am. It’s a serious addiction thing, as serious as it gets, and he’s been in the rehab system already, so, head in the clouds self-appointed situation analyst for the world that I am, I thought I’d get back to basics and try to cut past all of his learned stuff from the rehab industry, and say, “Man, we’re addicts because we’re not happy, that’s the thing, that’s about as specific and scientific as it gets. And if we’re not happy, then there is nothing and no-one making us happy and we need a new life, right?”

I have this idea that when we feel trapped and that there’s no way out that there is something we’re hanging onto, something we’re protecting, that of course we have locked at least one of those locked doors ourselves, in this case, I’m bitterly divorced, I think he’s trapped in a loveless marriage, and hanging onto that for some reason. I guess if he overdoses while still married, he never had to be as alone as me. Stay alive, my friend, please, don’t let me be writing how I pushed you over and don’t let my readers have to be reading it. He responded with what I think is a normal meme from psychology and rehab culture, that it’s not up to other people to try to make you happy. To which I freaked out.

“So, what, they’re not supposed to care? Are we not supposed to try to make them happy? We are not our brother’s keeper, every man for himself?”

And then it’s worse, if only for me at this point, and maybe you, going forward. I’m sorry. If you read my main blog, you know I see things as quite a bit worse along this vector, that I see human beings as discipline-obsessed warrior groups, and not only are other people “not responsible for our happiness,” but quite the reverse. We are responsible, charged with making one another miserable. “We are not responsible for the happiness of others” sounds like a nasty truth we’re avoiding, and so we want to think that’s the bottom, the worst of it, but the truth is rarely only one step away. So, now we’re in my trap, alone in this second layer, and I’m pissed off. I haven’t yet clued in that my man is on the precipice, or quite so close.

“Addiction is about happiness, and the world, the warrior society is geared up to piss us off, the whole world creates the situation, but rehab tells you it’s just you, and figure it out yourself.”

Of course, rehab is my friend’s only fucking hope, I am a toxic, insensate monster.

. . . 1:00 pm, he’s OK.

. . . morning again, January 13th., and I can’t believe it but it’s true, what I’ve been trying to get at, what I’ve been looking for, I said to my friend when he absolutely didn’t need to hear it, and now I can’t fucking remember it. It was some connection from my warrior society argument, that the human world’s majority function in terms of our happiness is to destroy it rather than create it and . . . women. His wife, my wife, both of our daughters. It’s what’s in the dark place for me, I think, women and my ambivalence about them in my life, but although I can make the “logical” case for a connection, it’s what I think I do, in that blind passionate moment where I was steamrolling the whole world including my friend’s immanent suicide to express myself, I think I found the personal connection for a second . . . and it’s gone. I can’t seem to re-create it in my mind since, and he’s not going to remember it, or I hope not for his sake.

So, this happens to me now, either marijuana is finally having the desired effect of wiping my memory out, or it’s because I’m crazy now, or psychological blocks are in effect that always have been, surely some combination of these and more unseen things besides, I can’t get there from here. Not a solution, just a new attempt, we’ll jump in at the end, try to work backwards. Straying into the sterile, I’m afraid. I’m trying to find my way back.

Women can be warriors! Women can do anything men can do except for specific physiological things that define the sexes, reproductive things, and men sure can’t do what women can in that area either. I’m not globalizing, not defining roles, I only mean this at the level of sperm, egg, and zygote. Women can do any human role except grow and ejaculate sperm, and men can’t do lady reproductive stuff, not news. Women can be warriors, and they are, and they have been – and if someone magically turned all the world’s beer to chlorine tomorrow, a lot more of them would be. It’s warrior society, is what I’m saying. If all the men disappeared tomorrow, women would be fearsome defenders of their homes and their children, game theory would still apply, and fighting would ensue where resources came into conflict.

We can see the world in positive or negative light, and of course, as a complex mix of both, etc., but if we can view humanity in a dark light, then I’m, sorry, but it’s not some few of us, the power elite – and it’s not just half of us either, the males. It’s all of us. If we’re walking out on that limb, making value judgments of our species, if that is in any way useful to do that, then let’s not explain our species by the behaviour of half or fewer of its members. If life on Earth for humans is a fairly constant state of détente or war, there are not half or more of the humans actually creating peace. Succeeding at it, I mean. We’re trying, but if what you got is detente at best, our efforts to make war are outstripping our efforts to stop it, and I’m sorry, but God has left us in charge. All the energy spent on both sides of this debate, war or peace, that is human effort. We have to understand that we create the human world.

And women are creators, powerful ones. The ladies’ efforts are not washed away in a flood of testosterone, their power stolen by men, they are creators, and this world is as much women’s’ creation as anyone else’s. I know we all want peace. Women want peace. This is where I invoke my consequences mimic meme, mothers trying to civilize their children by un-civilizing force; our intentions are peace, our behaviours are war. Now this.

It’s our behaviours, this is what I’m trying to get at.

“Male aggression” is not a thing in itself, not some Socratic essence; aggression is a strategy and a behaviour. If men disappeared tomorrow, women would get aggressive really quick, because that is human behaviour, to act believing that the best defense is a good offense. Is this not the so well received feminist message of Wonder Woman, women can be warriors? It’s part of my worldview, that in this fantasy, men disappeared or the Amazons’ land, that the girls get beaten as hard as the boys are in male dominated warrior cultures. I think that’s human behaviour, I think “the best defense is a good offense” is almost the human motto, and a good offense is guaranteed through systemic child abuse.

I’m ready to be pleasantly surprised, someone show me an all female peaceful society, I want that world, but the women are raising the kids now, in this world, and it’s not working out. Ah, maybe this is it!

I asked my self this question, “what is punishment,” or more accurately perhaps, “what is up with this punishment business?” (Side note: I want to say, ‘punishment bullshit,’ because that’s how I talk and how I write, but I didn’t ask myself this aloud. Turns out, my inside thinking voice prefers English. I’m surprised too.) This maybe twenty-five years ago, maybe a few more. For the first two decades or more I was convinced that punishment/discipline/consequences were identical to their illicit cousin, abuse, and that they therefore most likely were responsible for the same sorts of effects – which, yes, I’m still there – but during that period I thought it was some sort of accident, or I blamed cultural things, Leviticus and whatnot, for bringing about this state of affairs.

And I argued with people, in real life while we raised our kids, and for a few years online, while producing the early years of this blog and other blogs where the site has since passed on. The persistence of the normal attitudes around it were frustrating, and that people didn’t seem to have a clear definition of “punishment” at all was also irritating, like the language didn’t exist in which to have the conversation. All this against my background of popular psychology type thinking and very little real education . . . I don’t think I was aware yet that I was stonewalled, that further learning wasn’t forthcoming along this train of thought when some online argument challenged me to read Judith Rich Harris and Steven Pinker.

After a very traumatic reorganization of pretty much everything in my brain rolled out, I was able to bring a little more science to the problem, and by keeping basically the goals of social science in mind and not much else from it, and trying to see both sides of that disciplinary aisle, I have this, the Abusive Ape Theory (not married to the name, but I like the homage to the Aquatic Ape Theory), Antisocialization Theory, and the Consequences Mimic Meme – and I’m delusional, capitalizing my own stuff. But who else is gonna do it?

Really, it’s all there, it’s all out there, there is likely some hundredth monkey thing going on, everyone can know this, today, and I expect many do. All the pieces are out in public view.

The Abusive Ape Theory is the idea that we are an ape that abuses its children, leveraging epigenetic effects to said abuse and so we have created ourselves in the Deep Roots of War image, an ape that systematically desensitizes and traumatizes itself for a group-supporting effect of increased aggression and violence, one that supports our intergroup conflict. Dad says he was toughening us up, Twitler says we will be strong, all of this is the abuse that we feel during the genes’ epigenetically active years, and we adjust our internal configurations accordingly, to be less contented, rougher, and perhaps, as the psychologists say, to continue the pattern.

Antisocialization Theory is simply the apparently dark side of socialization theory, the latter being the idea of us all adapting to our given circumstances and society, learning the rules, customs, taboos, values, etc., of the humans and environment we live in and among. In one sense, it simply refers to the nasty stuff we learn, who to hate, how to fight, but in the more important sense, our antisocialization is the one that matters, because it’s the one with measurable, documented effects. It was Rich Harris who exhaustively laid out the socialization researchers’ hundred year long attempt to prove that parents create traits that they consider desirable in their children, and the near utter failure of it. This, while the mountain of evidence for the less “desirable” traits produced from abuse threatens to block out the sun. Abuse is our lever, the one that does something.

What it does is stress us out, make us angrier and more violent, and the only way to release stress is to spread it around. When a person is so stressed and damaged from too much or too chaotic abuse that they cannot function well in the private sector, the military is waiting for them, and that is as near the aboriginal function of antisocialization as you can get. I think also, though, modern armies don’t need every able bodied (and disabled-minded) male, a smallish percentage is enough – but we are all engaging in the function, and I haven’t repeated this for a year maybe – most of our pre-configured ready-made soldiers are just out there walking our streets, not some enemy’s, getting themselves and all of us into trouble. Yes, we’ve been socialized, both prosocialized and antisocialized, but just like in the movie series, it’s the dark side that has the power. It’s something like irony, to be sure, but if the definition of “nurture” in the context of ‘as opposed to “nature”’ is something the parents do to induce a trait in a child, then it’s a misnomer, because the traits we are able to actually effect are not the traits one induces with any “positive” “nurturing.”

I’m sorry to say, but the proof of the Nurture Assumption’s true underpinnings is that we can indeed modify a child’s development – just not in a “positive” way, and not in positive language. These days, it seems the biologists want to tell us all that there is no “nurture,” that it’s all “nature” – and for some reason, the profundity of real and documented negative effects is another conversation or something, parents can’t “affect” their kids. Abuse is somebody else’s job. The upshot, maybe I’ve never actually said it before, or for a long time –

We can’t teach a child mathematics by beating him and then teach him history the same way. You teach math by teaching math, you teach history by teaching history, and you teach beatings by teaching beatings. You cannot beat a child while expounding about history and pretend he won’t learn the beating – this stuff, this is maybe the worst of the blank slate magical sort of thinking there ever was, the idea that we can. Tell you something else too, Dr. Pinker – it predates Rousseau and all this blank slate atheism, this ‘beatings to produce nearly every imaginable and so often even mutually exclusive effects’ idea. This magic, one size fits all tool idea about abuse, this exists in inverse proportion to your dad’s idea behind the shed, though.

On the other side of our split personalities, we know what we’re doing, Dad knows he’s toughening us up. Certainly, the abuse of boot camp shows that the army knows that the purpose of abuse and discomfort isn’t to make us more peaceful. This brings us to the Mimic Meme.

Mom seems to think that when she whoops you, you’re supposed to get more peaceful, doesn’t she?

LOL.

So, antisocialization, that is beating a child to grow him up as a soldier, while let’s call it the “consequences” idea – that’s beating a child to turn him into . . . whatever Mom wants, is that right? Obedient soldier, for starters, I guess, and then obedient everything else after that? Obedient concert pianist, obedient foot masseur? Of course, it’s “good” child, “good” grandchild, student, soldier.

Both these memes, both these functions are out there, we beat ourselves violent and perhaps don’t know it, and we fail to beat ourselves into excellence and maybe don’t see that either . . . point is, we mean two completely different things by that one word, “good.” In half of life it means good about everything, good piano playing, good food, etc., but in the other context “good” means violence.

A mimic meme – a term I’m surely stealing and perverting – I will define by example. It’s when we tell a child, “Don’t make faces or one day, your face will freeze in that position.” We don’t believe the explanation, but if the child does, he stops making faces at the family at the next table, no bench-clearing family fights ensue at Applebee’s, peace is maintained – a real life benefit from a false meme, the idea that sometimes, peoples’ faces just freeze in mid expression, permanently. This is what the “consequences” idea is, one of these useful lies.

We tell a kid not to touch the lamp, he touches the lamp, we whoop his ass, maybe he never breaks the lamp, maybe he does, but he’s learned his beating, and we didn’t “abuse him to make a soldier of him,” we only taught him not to touch the lamp. That’s the consequences mimic meme, we can beat a kid for years, kids all live under this threat, so they are absolutely intractably antisocialized by it – but we have done nothing to propagate violence or war, we are simply teaching them how to live indoors and not break our stuff, right? And a house full of unbroken stuff sure looks like peace and civilization, so who’s to argue? Your face didn’t freeze like that did it?

The kind of “bad” we are born isn’t sin, it’s just what we see when we see a baby, a mammal baby, a human baby: helpless, sweet, loving. Folks have lived in competition forever, so those are “bad” traits, we need soldiers. Soldiers need discipline, so we beat our children. This “abuse” makes all humans that much meaner, like an arms race, and the tribe that doesn’t beat its children and leaves them at some default level of nasty loses on the battlefield.

Prosocial is “sin” to the warrior society, a threat to security. What I love is, peel it away, we don’t think “original sin,” we don’t think we’re evil, in fact we know ourselves to be less capable of war than we feel we need to be, for our security, and the proof is we know how to fix it. Abuse works for that, while psychology has searched for a hundred years for “positive influence” from parents and found zero. Abuse’s evidence is plentiful. That’s my case, except, epigenetics. There are genetic responses to abuse, and the point of that is, with abuse, we get control.

This is Nobel prize shit, BTW. Don’t anybody try to steal, I’ve been publishing online for years already. Spread the word if you like, but mention my name. LOL